RAMALLAH (Ma’an) – The Palestinian Authority minister of telecommunications said Tuesday that hackers from more than 20 countries attacked the telecommunications network, interrupting all cable-based services.

Mashhour Abu Daqqa said the Palestinian telecommunications company PalTel recorded some 1 million attacks per second on the Palestinian grid, a coordinated effort disrupting services across the occupied territories.

Specialists are dealing with the problem and trying to prevent the full collapse of Internet services in Palestine, Abu Daqqa said.

“This was a serious act of sabotage and it came from more than 20 countries. All the attacks targeted servers of the Palestinian telecommunication company,” the minister told Ma'an.

PalTel said early Tuesday that a technical fault was to blame for the outage.

The outages affected Internet in homes and businesses across the occupied territories, before it slowly returned in the afternoon. Ma'an's website went offline for several hours during the incident.

In August, telecommunications in Gaza went offline for 24 hours, cutting off Internet and mobile phones. PalTel blamed Israeli military activities along the border for severing a key underground line.